Secaucus, New Jersey | Sealed
Time: Friday January 25th – Sunday January 27th
Players: 1400 Winner: Max Williams

Friday – Last Chance Trails


The Impossible Penalty
I was called over to a table where a player asked me to tell the people adjacent to him to stop talking about their pools. I was on my way to another task, and had kind of offhandedly taken the call, I turned to the group of offending players, not really paying too much attention to who in particular was doing that chatting, or what exactly they were chatting about about and rather loudly explained the policy about discussing pools. In that you aren't supposed to. When I arrived at the stage to drop off the slips I had been ferrying however, the HJ of the PTQ asked if I had given an OA penalty in his event, I paused for a moment, and then replied that I had not, in fact it hadn't even really crossed my mind. He mentioned that perhaps I should've asked the players a few questions, which I think was totally within reason. I think if I hadn't been on my way to another task, I may have given more time to this call, so I suppose the lessons here are to give each judge call time to breathe, and if you don't have time to properly execute a call, to ensure you give it to someone who does, and, as always, to investigate always.

Bribery & Wagering is Still a DQ Sometimes
With the change of the bribery/wagering rule (now only a ML instead of an instant DQ if unintentional) the ability to “get away” with bribery/wagering is more of a concern now. One of the things that one of my team members proposed as a good litmus test to see if it was intentional or not, was to ask players if they are aware of the penalty for bribery/wagering while you are investigating the infraction, if they say “yeah, it's a ML” there's a pretty good chance that they know the rest of the policy as well, and perhaps for them it isn't such a ML after all.

Two GRVs Are Better Than One!
A player attacked with a creature, the opponent took damage, and then a few turns later, both players realized that they had calculated the creature's power incorrectly, and called a judge. I ended up issuing a GRV to the player who controlled the creature and an FTMSG to the other player. Which seemed to confuse both players, I thought for a moment about double GRV here, but for some reason decided it wasn't really an option, and didn't issue it. I later found out this was incorrect, and the double GRV was indeed the correct choice.

Ghost Quarter Quandary
This was not a call I took, but a call another judge consulted me on, AP controls Leonin Arbiter, and Ghost Quarter's his opponent's Steam Vents, the opponent begins looking for a basic, but AP stops him, then a judge was called. I was pretty comfortable on issuing GRV to the opponent, but other judges made a pretty compelling argument for LEC. This is similar to a recent ruling on cards with Jump-Start that result in drawing cards, where players fail to discard to cast the spell and begin resolving it. Instead of ruling GRV (which seems to be technically more in line with philosophy) we rule the more punitive, and specific HCE. Following the same philosophy here, instead of ruling GRV for beginning to search the library, we rule with the more specific LEC.

Extra Time Allocated?

On launch weekend for sealed, it's suggested that we offer players an extra 15 minutes for construction, in the main event, this extra time is always awarded (making for an arduous 45 minute construction period) I asked if we were going to offer this extra time to players in the LCTs and the team lead opted not to implement this due to personnel and time constraints. I found this a little odd since LCTs are kind of supposed to set player expectations for main. But I do understand that +15 minutes on each LCT would tax already thin judge resources and stretch out the day immeasurably. Another odd thing about LCTs was the fact that we had to change our starting table number to send players over to the finals area, usually we just post a paper that says “report to table x”. This didn't really impede players or judges in any way.

Saturday – Main Event - Slips


Working in the Trenches
So, MF Jersey was busy! Main event was sold out, and sides were insanely busy. Event placement was chaos, the morning modern event was split into four places, a row of ODEs got dropped adjacent to the row of main, it was chaos. I accidentally assumed one player was in the Regular REL modern event and issued a JAR-style marked cards instead of the Comp REL warning they should've gotten because they were instead in the MQ.

Serum Scour
This wasn't something that came up, but was a thought experiment proposed by another judge, let's assume a player casts Serum Visions but instead resolves Thought Scour by milling two and drawing a card. I proposed that we rule it GRV and take the two milled cards and have them scry with them. Effectively as long as none of the cards in the library were known prior, drawing the card on top and the third card down has no effective difference.

Dovin's Lack of Acuity
At the end of the day in a Regular REL event I had a player cast Dovin's Acuity but didn't totally understand how it worked, and called me over. I explained how the card worked and allowed the player to take back the move, since nothing had really happened after casting it other than an argument about how it worked. The opponent seemed upset by the takeback at first, and understandably so. I explained to him the aim of regular was education and fun, rather than stringent adherence to technically correct play. He seemed to understand and be okay with this conclusion and by the end of the interaction both players seemed satisfied. I was pretty pleased with how this went because I do feel like if the followup explanation had been handled differently there was a real possibility of the player being quite upset by the ruling.

Sunday – Mythic Qualifier - Team Lead - Slips, Pairings, EOR


MQ Team Leading: Take 2
I was team leading the MQ (sadly no longer the MCQ or as it was more affetctionately known, McQualifier) and actually got to do not deck checks this time! The event itself was quite large, 475 players in total. The first task of the day was orienting pairings boards, we were opting to use both sides of the board and to make this evident to the players we turned the pairings boards 90 degrees, I was concerned about this initially, but it seemed to work pretty effectively. Unfortunately this had the side effect, of half a board being stolen by a sealed event, I solved this by coagulating one the letter ranges mid round as the event had shrunk enough for that to be tenable by that time.

Breaks were communicated a little poorly, half my team went on break in R2 and R3, unfortunately, this is also when deck checks decided to go on break, and the rest of the deck check team was still trying to do deck checks, so R2 and R3 were thinly staffed.

Another issue I had was, while I did the right thing and rotated the team members around to the various tasks I failed to communicate who was running EOR each round to the different team members. Which caused a little confusion in a few of the rounds where certain members of the team were uncertain whether EOR was happening or not, and we ended up with two rival clip-boarders.

...In Conclusion
Overall I felt like New Jersey was one of the funnest events I've worked in a while, I got to take judge calls, I got to do regular judge tasks. Things were hectic enough to keep me busy and excited. Working New Jersey really reminded me of what I love about working events, and the GP Circuit. The entire event left me really excited for the future.